ZeroC Chooses Sleepycat Software for Communications Middleware

LINCOLN, Mass., June 9 -- Sleepycat Software, makers of Berkeley DB -- the most widely deployed data management software in the world -- today announced that ZeroC, provider of fast and highly scalable communications infrastructure software, has selected Berkeley DB as the core data manager for its new service called Freeze.

Freeze provides automatic persistence for objects described in ZeroC's Internet Communications Engine (Ice) infrastructure software. Ice is middleware that simplifies and accelerates the task of writing programs that communicate with each other over a network. Ice compares to technologies such as CORBA and DCOM but is much easier for programmers to learn and use.

"Berkeley DB represents the de-facto standard for embedded databases," said Michi Henning, co-founder and chief scientist of ZeroC, a privately-held company based in Massachusetts. "Our engineers have had excellent results in using Berkeley DB. It has proven itself in performance, size, stability and multi-platform support."

Ice supports major operating systems and programming languages, ensuring that customer programs can communicate with each other regardless of computing environment. Ice is used in various applications, including a very large scale online game called Wish that supports tens of thousands of simultaneous players in a single shared environment.

"With Berkeley DB as the backend datastore, Ice dramatically improves the speed of our massively multi-player online game," said James Moffet, senior vice president of Mutable Realms, developers of Wish.

"We bring 15 years of customer experience and more than 200 million deployments with our data management software to provide ZeroC with a rock solid foundation for their core Ice product," said Michael Olson, CEO of Sleepycat Software. "ZeroC is a true pioneer in communications infrastructure software and their engineers are pushing the edges of the technology to give their customers breakthrough performance."

About ZeroC
ZeroC provides a fast and highly-scalable communications infrastructure for demanding technical applications, such as telecom, defense, on-line entertainment, manufacturing, and process control. ZeroC's core product is Ice, the Internet Communications Engine. Ice is one of the most versatile and powerful object middleware platforms ever. Ice also serves as ZeroC's base product for future Web service offerings and other specialized communications solutions. With an aggressive, no-nonsense licensing model for the Open Source community (GPL, the GNU General Public License), in addition to traditional proprietary licensing models for commercial customers, ZeroC aims to establish Ice as the leading technical middleware product. For more information, visit http://www.zeroc.com.

About Sleepycat Software
Sleepycat Software ( http://www.sleepycat.com ) makes Berkeley DB, the most widely-used application-specific data management software in the world with more than 200 million deployments. Customers such as Alcatel, Amazon, British Telecom, Cisco Systems, EMC, Ericsson, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Motorola, RSA Security, Sun Microsystems, TIBCO and Veritas rely on Berkeley DB for fast, scalable, reliable and cost-effective data management for their mission-critical applications. Profitable since it was founded in 1996, Sleepycat is a privately-held company with offices in California and Massachusetts.